Philip-Lorca diCorcia turns
conventions of photography inside out. The art has always been divided
between the finders and the makers, proponents of the decisive moment on the
one hand, and of the directorial mode on the other; but diCorcia confutes
any narrow fixation on either one to the exclusion of the other. His work
concerns the total mutual permeation of artifice and accident, the
constructed and the fortuitous. Take, for example, what are probably his
best-known series, the ‘Streetworks’ he has been shooting in cities around
the world – Tokyo, New York, Calcutta, Los Angeles, Havana, and so on –
since the mid-1990s. As has often been noted, they play off the street
photography of the ’70s, the work of people like Gary Winogrand, yet in
place of Winogrand’s sense of speed and spontaneity (as his posthumously
exhibited contact sheets show, by the end of his life Winogrand must have
been shooting faster than the eye could ever see), diCorcia’s street
pictures possess a cinematic sheen yet a sculptural sense of stasis. Unlike
the work of certain other contemporary photographers, the monumentality of
these images owes little to the mere size at which they are printed;
diCorcia’s prints may be big in comparison to those of the classic
photographers but they are dwarfed by much of the work coming out of
contemporary Germany. Rather, it is diCorcia’s almost Caravaggiesque
handling of light that gives his models (and of what other street
photographer has one ever felt compelled to refer to his subjects as
models?) their uncanny sense of presence – physical presence, in any case,
though often emotional absence. In these pictures we spy absolutely
contingent constellations of passing bodies, yet each figure seems so
freighted with his or her unreconstructable intentions that it is as if all
of them were on their way to meet their individual destinies – or rather,
perhaps, as if the destiny of each one were nothing other than to appear
here, at this fateful nexus, which is the making of the photograph.

The interplay between presence and absence becomes most evident in
diCorcia’s recent ‘Heads’ or portraits, which are really a subcategory of
his street scenes. Like the latter, the ‘Heads’, exhibited at the
Photographers’ Gallery in London as part of the 2002 Citigroup Private Bank
Photography Prize exhibition, pick out random men and women through the use
of hidden flash units and a camera placed in such a manner so as not to be
noticed by the passersby who cross its domain. But in this series the
context melts away. Background becomes a nebulous darkness the better to
body forth the strange landscape of a face unaccountably powerful in its
inexpressiveness: an elderly, bearded rabbi whose eyes are heavy with age;
an amazingly clear-featured young woman who could easily be on her way to
try out as a model for one of diCorcia’s own commercial assignments; a
grim-faced, heavyset mailman; a bald middle-aged man whose dark glasses give
him the inscrutable air of a Secret Service agent, and so on. Peter Galassi
has called them archetypes, yet they symbolise nothing but themselves.

The pictures taken between 1978 and 1999 that diCorcia gathered together
under the title ‘A Storybook Life’, shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery,
London, in 2003, show a somewhat different aspect of his work. Superficially
they look more oblique and even casual than the street scenes, and more
intimate as well, concentrating as they do on domesticity and leisure and
featuring so many more interiors, or suburban or even rural settings, than
urban exteriors. So many of the people are laying down: a heavy, bearded man
in bed next to a teddy bear; one man sleeping as another sits smoking in
front of a manual typewriter; a nude woman, whose face somehow looks older
than her body, smiles seductively at the camera while a pair of lamps are
focused on the drink sitting on the coffee table in the foreground, a
paperback copy of Kafka’s Amerika (1927) on the floor beneath it; an
infant on its back in the grass, its arms spread wide to the shaded heavens.
These are not simply strangers who happen to have walked into the
photographer’s light trap, but rather friends and family who have willingly
given themselves to the photographer’s work. But one quickly sees that their
poses are as full of rhetorical emphasis as those in any image by Jeff Wall,
and that simple daylight has been manipulated as in any of diCorcia’s other
pictures, though here one might think more of the brightness pierced with
crisp shadows of de Chirico rather than the light-crossed obscurity of
Caravaggio. Still, there’s a different poignancy to this light, a sense that
it has sculpted these figures more slowly, more caressingly than those in
the street scenes. If the latter catch what de Chirico called the enigma of
arrival, the images in ‘A Storybook Life’ instead seem to chronicle the
melancholy of departure – the people and places one already knows one is
fated to miss.

Barry Schwabsky is the author of
The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art
(Cambridge University Press) and Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press)